Dear friends, 

I have no doubt that when you see this letter, you will have noticed the brand-new banner that has adorned this blog. The matter at hand is that I have been thinking about a new name, and now the realization has come, and as always, it turned out to be the obvious choice. I am pleased to announce that TWYcinema. is now “La Frédérique.”

By choosing this name, it means we are choosing revolution, which means choosing fluidity, freedom, openness, morality, roleplaying, and all the other good stuff – all in all, cinema, in honor of one of the greatest actresses that ever graced the screen, the late actor/director/novelist, Juliet Berto (1947-1990), who in Out 1, Jacques Rivette’s 1971 masterpiece, created the role of Frédérique, a brave, curious, queer and cheeky con artist, a young woman who tries to survive in a gloom world of post-revolution hysteria and cynicism. But it was with her creativity, as well as that of all the participants of the film: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bulle Ogier, Michèle Moretti, Hermine Karagheuz, etc., to name a few, that this gloom was transformed into one of the most uncompromising and entertaining film experiments of all time. We believe that Frédérique and Berto are, by all definition of the word, a symbol of the youth and the history of cinema. 

In Berto, not only with her collaborations with the likes of Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as her own directorial efforts, we see a lineage all the way back to the primitive days of our beloved seventh art, as early as in Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915-1916), the celebrated crime serial in which one character, Juliette Bertaux, an alias of the shapeshifting Irma Vep (played by the great Musidora), almost certainly inspired Berto’s stage name. Sharing their love for Feuillade, Berto and Rivette would pay their tribute with Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), in which Berto and her costar, the delightful Dominique Labourier, played a scene in the classic Les Vampires catsuit (pictured below), more than twenty years before Maggie Cheung tried on her latex version of the suit in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996), now with a HBO-backed series redux which I will write about very soon. And in her directorial debut, Neige, co-directed with Jean-Henri Roger in 1981, Berto points to the other parts of Paris, unseen by the cinema of its time, discovering the ghettos, the drug dealers, the porno theaters, the trans scene, and more survivors. In Out 1, we also found a bit of “Irma Vep” in Frédérique, as we would find in all great actors, a joy in the art of disguise, child-like even, in the sense of playfulness, solitary and determination. A formidable pickpocket, let us not forget, Frédérique also reminds us that there are always many things to steal from, material or intellectual, in a world that does nothing but stealing in grander terms. If the “Grand Vampires” of our society always launch their attacks from the shadow of offices, bureaus and high-rises (Feuillade had known this a hundred years ago), Frédérique must strike from the ground, but always too tenderly and too childishly – for she is the ground, she is the people, and just the people. In short, may her spiritual and bodily wits, so fun and with such uncertainty, bless this humble site in the ever-changing landscape of the future. In terms of writing, we will still be running on its current course, but hopefully towards something more. So let me just say not only the site is now named after Frédérique, it is, above all, pour Frédérique.

T.W.Y.
Jul 13, 2022